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Politics Just Won’t Leave Hockey Alone

Michelle and Barack Obama at a Detroit rally last Sunday, the latest injection of hockey into the 2008 U.S. election campaign. (Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images)

On Sept. 1 my colleague Stu Hackel was pilloried by some readers for writing about John McCain’s new vice-presidential pick, Sarah Palin, and her self-designation as a “hockey mom.” “Stick to HOCKEY!” one miffed reader wrote in, distilling the sentiments of several who thought politics had no place in any discussion of the winter game.

If only that were so … but it isn’t. Stu was prescient; since he wrote that post, hockey has continued to be to the 2008 campaign what soccer moms were to the 1996 campaign and Nascar dads were in 2004. And it’s not just this year’s presidential campaign that has put hockey front and center.

In the senatorial race in Minnesota, Republican incumbent Norm Coleman has taken credit for helping to return an NHL franchise to the state — and his claim that “he brought hockey back” is a central point in this TV campaign ad:

That prompted his Democratic opponent, Al Franken, to turn that claim into a point of ridicule. “Norm Coleman talks about bringing hockey back to Minnesota — how about bringing jobs back?” asks this Franken ad:

Hockey seems to be stuck in the middle of political discourse at even the most random times. Take the case of the Chilean wine Palín Syrah, popular in the San Francisco area — or at least it was popular until McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. Sales of the wine in that liberal region plunged, although they suddenly went through the roof in conservative Houston.

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Slap Shot, the New York Times hockey blog, reports on the Rangers, the National Hockey League and anything that glides quickly across a frozen surface anywhere on the globe, from the snowy prairies of Saskatchewan to the frigid steppes of Russia and beyond, like, say, Phoenix.

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